Raspberry Pi Touchscreen Driver Finally Being Mainlined With Linux 4.21 Kernel

Finally with the in-development Linux 4.21 kernel will be the input driver for supporting the Raspberry Pi 7-inch touchscreen.

Raspberry Pi has long offered an official 7-inch touchscreen monitor with 800x480 display that interfaces with the Raspberry Pi ARM SBCs via power from the GPIO and display via the DSI port. The touchscreen support 10-finger touch and other basic features but until now hasn't seen mainline kernel support.

With the input changes sent in today for the Linux 4.21 kernel, the raspberrypi-ts driver enables support for the touchscreen. This 200+ lines of code input driver acquires the information from a memory mapped area via the Raspberry Pi firmware.

The Raspberry Pi 7-inch touchscreen retails for about $60 USD and with the Linux 4.21 should be playing nicely with the mainline kernel.